Cross-lingual transfer parsing for low-resourced languages: an Irish case study

We present a study of cross-lingual direct transfer parsing for the Irish language. Firstly we discuss mapping of the annotation scheme of the Irish Dependency Treebank to a universal dependency scheme. We explain our dependency label mapping choices and the structural changes required in the Irish Dependency Treebank. We then experiment with the universally annotated treebanks of ten languages from four language family groups to assess which languages are the most useful for cross-lingual parsing of Irish by using these treebanks to train delexicalised parsing models which are then applied to sentences from the Irish Dependency Treebank. The best results are achieved when using Indonesian, a language from the Austronesian language family